Relations between the Japanese and South Korean governments have turned downright frosty in recent months, and both sides have found it difficult to strike agreement – or even hold meetings – on the most basic issues like military intelligence sharing. But a bilateral private-sector effort between leading telecom providers in each country on cloud service and protection of personal data has been making great strides.

South Korean telecom giant KT Corp. announced May 30 that it will launch a cloud, or web-based storage service called “Cloud K,” in Japan through a joint project with Japan’s Softbank Corp, the most recent venture in three years’ of collaboration between Softbank and KT on cloud development in Asia. In 2011, both companies worked together on a $65 million construction project to open a data center in Gimhae, a city near Busan. The Gimhae center uses a submarine fiber-optic line connected exclusively through Busan to Japan’s Kitakyushu region. Its location appealed to Japanese companies as a stable storage source in the aftermath of the 3/11 triple disaster, a wakeup call for the volatility of information recovery due to earthquakes or blackouts.